Empty Yellow Light
by RainbowBetty
Summary: Sam's Hell was Lucifer, and Lucifer burned cold. Since getting his soul back, Sam can't seem to remember what warm even felt like. Dean buys him fuzzy girly socks.


"What about Florida?" Dean asks randomly, sitting down beside Sam on the step of Bobby's porch and shielding his eyes from the direct beam of late afternoon sunlight.

Sam looks up at him, puzzled. "What _about _Florida?"

"Or... you know. California, maybe."

"Oh." Sam wraps his arms tighter around himself. _Anyplace warm, _that's what Dean seems to be trying to say, because he's noticed Sam wearing two pairs of socks and standing over the heating vents in the floor, even though it's technically open-window weather and Bobby wouldn't ordinarily even have the heat turned on. Dean thinks he's being so offhand with his concern, just like Sam thought he wasn't letting on how bad the cold is. "You don't think this might be sort of bad timing for a vacation?"

Dean doesn't say anything else right away, he just makes a face acknowledging how much everything sucks.

It's actually too warm for a jacket, Dean realizes, feeling the sun beating down on his bent legs and shoulders, captured and concentrated in the darker fabric of his jeans and trapping the heat against this skin. He rubs the palms of his hands over them, dispersing the heat waves. He can feel a line of sweat breaking out along his hairline.

Beside him, Sam shivers.

It's Hell. They don't talk about it, but that's what this is. Sam hasn't really been warm since he got his soul back, and Dean is haunted by the memory he has of Lucifer breathing frost over a window in Detroit and remarking how most people think he burns hot. At the time, he'd wanted to take it as a metaphor. But Sam seems to have come back with the conviction that he'll never be warm again, and if he can't fix what happened to Sam at least he can fix that.

"Let's get you back inside," Dean says, getting to his feet beside his brother and waiting for Sam to follow. He wants to add _out of the cold_, but it feels too much like patronizing, and that's one thing he won't do. "Come on."

Sam leans back, his face tilted up and squinting into the sun. "I keep... coming out here, you know? To see if I'll feel anything?"

He says it like a question and then looks over at Dean who is standing on the top step, waiting.

"What is it you think you're gonna feel out here?"

"The sun," he says, and Dean looks at him strangely. It makes Sam wish he hadn't said anything at all, because it was an odd thing to say and Dean hates it when the things Sam says don't make sense. Sam hates it when Dean looks at him with that mixture of apprehension and pity. "I don't," he goes on, haltingly, _"feel it _at all. There's no warmth to it, it's just... light. It goes right through me. It's like it's not... real. Or I'm not."

Dean reaches down and quickly takes hold of Sam's bandaged hand as soon as Sam says it, because he knows what means _real _to Sam right now and he can't stand to see him keep hurting himself.

"Stop," he says. "Stop it. Yes you are. You're just cold, is all. You want to try a bath again?"

Warm water is a thing that sometimes works, until Sam sits too long and the bath water goes cold and he seems to forget how to breathe.

They tried a shower once, and it was weeks before Sam would let any sort of running water touch his skin again after the episode _that _caused. It triggered something, that's all he'll say, not what or why, and Dean doesn't want to know. Sam's Hell is his own business.

But Sam turns down the idea of a bath and lets Dean lead him inside, sits at the kitchen table and clenches his teeth to keep them from chattering while Dean makes a pot of coffee because it will give Sam something warm to hold on to, and that's a thing that sometimes works, too.

He's at the drugstore restocking supplies a few days later when he sees an endcap display of girly colored, striped fuzzy socks. Maybe it's Sam's two-sock habit lately, or just the fact that he's cold _all the time, _but he's suddenly standing in the middle of the drugstore with a mental picture of his brother's gigantic man-feet in pink fuzzy socks, and he realizes he's getting odd looks from people because he can't stop grinning like an idiot.

Sam would think this is funny. He needs to see Sam smile, maybe even laugh. Maybe just roll his eyes the way he used to whenever Dean's version of funny was especially not. He remembers _that _Sam. He would do anything to have that Sam back, the one who was his brother and not this hollow, haunted version of him.

He knows how selfish that makes him, how ungrateful. He hates that he had let himself vaguely entertain the hope that Sam would wake up fine, soul intact, ready to take on the next shitstorm that life was bound to throw at them. He knew better. He has his own nightmares dogging his heels, and he can't quite drink enough to make himself be who he used to be, or believe his own lies.

So he digs through the rack to find the largest size, which isn't actually all that large because there's no teenage girl in the world with feet as big as Sam's - and if there is, then Dean pities her.

He tosses the bag to Sam as soon as he comes in and says _got you something, princess_. Sam looks puzzled. Then something almost like a smile plays over his face, and Dean's insides squeeze with joy and relief and little-brother-affection all at once.

"Uh... thanks?" he says, holding the socks up between them. "Why?"

"Because pink is your color," Dean says.

"These are..." There's no mistaking it. Sam is smiling. In that _oh-my-god-you-did-not _way that's one bad joke away from an eye roll. "Horrifying," he finishes. "You don't really expect me to wear these, do you?"

"Oh, I _need _to see you wear them."

"You're jealous, is that it? Because you know I can pull these off better than you ever could."

Sam strips off his two layers of white crew socks and wiggles his feet into them.

"You look frigging ridiculous," Dean gloats, pulling out his phone. "Bobby needs to see this."

And all at once it's so normal. So comfortingly, achingly normal that Dean almost misses the moment when Sam's eyes skitter to the corner behind him and his expression changes.

"Sam?"

His gaze snaps back to Dean, but he's different. Fearful. His eyes dart warily back to the corner and he touches the bandage over the wound on his hand, grasping for something he knows is real.

"Sammy? Is it Lucifer?"

Something must be happening that Dean can't see, because Sam gasps and jerks back against the couch and then scrambles to his feet, the backs of his knees contacting with the armrest and knocking him off balance. He throws a hand out to steady himself, but then his feet skid out from under him, slick synthetic nylon fibers sliding over hardwood floors, and he goes down hard.

Dean curses and grabs his arms, helping him up, and Sam winces and stops. "Shit!" he says. "Aah, my back!"

"Okay, here." He gets an arm under Sam and maneuvers him back to the couch. "What'd you do, throw it out?"

Sam tentatively leans forward and stretches, testing his range of motion. "Just wrenched it. I think."

"You stay put, I'll get a heating pad."

"Dean! It's fine."

"It's _not fine!" _Dean spins on him, pissed at himself and the stupid fuzzy socks and the shower that seemed like such a good idea but just made his brother shriek and claw at his own skin with his fingernails, and his pathological need to make Sam be _Sam _so that everything can be okay again. So that _he _can be okay. "I'm sorry. It's not. Just... don't move."

He rummages through Bobby's upstairs closets until he finds the small, cloth-covered pad with the electrical cord twisted around it. He brings it back downstairs and plugs it into the wall next to the couch, handing Sam the heating pad and the temperature dial, set to 6 out of 10.

Sam takes it without arguing, even giving Dean a small grin and nod of acknowledgement, and he leans forward enough to slide it between his back and the cushions of the couch.

Dean notices that Sam is still wearing the fuzzy socks.

"You can take those off," he says.

"I actually kind of like them."

"They don't even fit you."

Sam looks down at them and shrugs. Dean shakes his head and goes into the kitchen to make another pot of coffee because that's a thing that sometimes works.

A minute later, he hears Sam calling his name, loudly and insistently, and Dean almost breaks both legs tripping over the table to get back to the living room.

Sam is sitting on the edge of the couch, hugging the heating pad to his chest with a completely blissed-out look on his face. The temperature dial in his hand is cranked up to 10, as far as it will go.

"Oh my _god,_" he murmurs. "It's _warm. _Dean, it's _warm. _I can feel it."

"Really?" Dean comes back to the couch and puts a hand over Sam's on top of the heating pad, and it's hot, way too hot, but Sam was too cold for too long. "Give it here, let me see your feet."

Sam puts his feet in Dean's lap and hands him the heating pad, and Dean peels off the ridiculous pink socks, wrapping the pad around both of Sam's ice-cold feet. Sam's eyebrows shoot up in surprise and he lets out a moan. Then he actually laughs, half embarrassment, half pure joy. "That's amazing," he says. "That... that feels so good. It's _warm, _Dean. I didn't think..."

Dean looks over at him, and there are tears tracking down Sam's face.

"Hey! Sam? You okay?"

Sam nods. "It's uh..." He shifts closer to Dean, gratefully. "This feels real."

Dean squeezes Sam's leg, resolving that first thing tomorrow he's going to go buy Sam a full-size electric blanket and let him bury himself in it.

"It is," he promises.

* * *

_End_


End file.
